The irony about that headline is that athletic boosters, who actively grease the wheels if not the palms, are the most willing and ready to weigh-in and express disapproval if not remedies. Cue the irony and the facts we hate.
One thing – and reader, there are many – that you pick up from working at the interface between PR and journalism is how aware you become of the vulnerabilities of the former and constraints of the latter, the need to go right up to the line between without misleading or insulting anyone. Especially yourself. Everyone who has done this work understands it well, but can misunderstand the notion of ‘protecting the institution,’ where we internalize and suppress certain things about what we know, perhaps under the illusion of self-preservation even at the expense of the broader endeavor.* We don’t want to think this is how these things happen or how they work – a little too much agency perhaps, but we watch them unfold nonetheless.
So the image up top. Occasionally we need to detain the messenger for questioning. The boosterism of local newspapers, heightened into absurdity by conglomeration and then into farce in the role as any state’s singular media outlet, provides a hothouse for particular dragons. To maintain a hands-off approach clear of financial conflict but convenient about loyalties begs questions out into the exoplanetary realm. What are the incentives to comfort or afflict? The information plot as essentially promotional fails on its own terms. Gather at the Derrida but what tensions remain in that line, or are they bled away into headlines about headlines? Who’s headlines were these, anyway? And then the egregious mention of ‘notoriety’ as though the product of some unknown force. They’re doing us a favor by being so clumsy about it.
There’s a lot to remember, granted. But let’s do better. The extent to which the word sequence ‘data center’ is simply deployed as a political, economic, and environmental gravity unto itself would be an excellent place to start.
* one gets moved up into crisis communications and comes to understand the same problem in a different way.